Magic a Fujitsu Celvin Q802 into a QNAP TS-469 Pro

A Fujitsu Celvin Q802 (much like previous Celvin models) is simply a rebranded QNAP model with a firmware modification. In this instance the Fujitsu firmware limits some of the features of the equivalent QNAP firmware such as the HDMI out found on TS-x69 models.

First of all confirm that you do indeed have a Q802 in your posession, the back ports layout should be exactly as this:

Rear of Q802/TS-469

Notice the HDMI out port at top and the USB3 and USB2 ports. The front of your NAS will also have an LCD config/notification screen. This all confirms you have the right model.

OK, before you begin you need some tools to get going:

A USB keyboard, USB mouse, a monitor with VGA port to attach to the NAS

A totally different computer to create the bootable USB and later to run QFinder and the web control panel (pref Windows 7)

Grab a spare USB stick (at least 1GB) and be sure that you do not need anything off it as it will be formatted

Finally click create, this creates the USB Linux OS boot drive for you

Don’t remove the USB stick just yet.

Copy the ‘F_TS-469_20140516-1.2.8.img‘ firmware file to the USB stick

On the USB stick rename the firmware file you just copied to simply ‘dom.img‘

Now you can safely eject the USB stick from your computer

Pick up the USB stick and take it to your NAS drive.

Ensure the NAS is switched off

Ensure you have removed ALL dsk drives from your NAS.

Plug in the keyboard, mouse and attach the monitor to the VGA port.

Plug in a network cable, ensure your router will allocate a DHCP address

Plug in the USB stick to any of the available USB 2.0 ports on the back (2 of them should be in use by your keyb/mouse)

Switch on your NAS and allow it to boot into Precise Puppy, wait a few minutes. Once in the GUI the fun really starts.

Close off any windows that pop up by clicking OK/Kill until you can see the Puppy desktop. Don’t worry about localisation settings.

Locate the console/terminal icon in top left of Puppy desktop. Double click it to launch a terminal shell session.

REMEMBER: You may need to turn off Num Lock as it is enabled in the NAS BIOS by default!

Type in these commands at the shell prompt:

sudo su

fdisk -l

Look at the list of drives displayed, your USB stick will be SDB (/dev/sdb) and the NAS Local Flash Storage will be SDA (/dev/sda). YOUR USB may use a different mount point e.g. /DEV/SDB1 or SDB2 etc.! We will confirm this in the following step, first you need to create a new folder, do this:

type in ls to list directory and confirm you can see dom.img in the list. If you can then SDB is definitely your USB stick and SDA is your NAS local storage drive. Only if you cannot see dom.img or any contents of you USB stick then the drives are the other way around. Shutdown, boot up again and reverse the volumes in the instructions above.

Finally you need to copy dom.img to the NAS local storage drive, type in this command:

cp dom.img /dev/sda(copies dom.img to the NAS local storage)

That’s it. Shut down you NAS. All set to reboot, first REMOVE THE USB DRIVE, then start your NAS and see if it takes the firmware. On the monitor, after the BIOS screen you should see 1 or 2 single digits on the top left. Shortly after you should see the screen as below and hear some beeps:

qnap boot screen

The LCD screen should show ‘Ready for Test Ver 1.2.8’ and eventually on the desktop monitor display you are prompted with a login screen (admin/admin if you really want to!). At this point the fan will be very noisy, ignore it.

Don’t panic if nothing happens. You might have to do the whole copy dom.img file process again. It didn’t work until my 3rd attempt. Don’t ask me why!

Once you have the factory firmware 1.2.8 running and can see the logon prompt place a SINGLE hard disk drive into HDD1 caddy (yes, its fine if you do it hot!).

Additionally from the official QNAP support page for the TS-469 download a slightly older non-factory firmware, I downloaded TS-469_20130816-3.8.4.img to my local disk. I know other people have tried direct to firmware 4.1.0 with success, so you may wish to try that directly. I was being extra cautious in my procedure. We will use the Qfinder or Web Interface to install the firmwar update.

Launch QNAP finder and let it locate your NAS drive.

Please IGNOREthe pop-up prompt to update to latest version 4.x of firmware, we’re going to take a gradual approach [Please see Update below].

Notice as a curiosity that the MAC address shows up as 00-00-00-00-00-00. NOTE:This may be just my own setup, because the same network card/MAC was previosuly part of my home network while this NAS was still a Celvin Q802; it was setup as a DHCP port reservation on a .11 address.

Complete the basic configuration as prompted, I chose the manual setup, gave my NAS a new name (CONQUEROR) & and left it as JBOD single disk. Once these initial tasks were complete I tried to update the firmware from QFinder but it repeatedly failed and the connectivity was unstable for an unknown reason. I switched to the browser interface (how? right click on your NAS in QFinder and choose the browser option! OR browse directly to http://your_NAS’s_IP/:8000) , chose System Settings > Firmware Update, I selected Browse… and browsed to my local copy of the 3.8.4 firmware file ‘TS-469_20130816-3.8.4.img‘ and selected ‘Update System‘. You can see the progress below:

It completed succesfully and the NAS rebooted. It took a while so be patient, but now the NAS was in a supported steady state and the connection via QFinder was far more stable. The fan also stopped being so LOUD, and the front LCD panel showed the normal information (NAS name, IP etc.). The correct MAC was also now displayed in QFinder.

My final step was actually to accept the pop-up prompt to update the Firmware via QFinder to version 4.1.0, which it downloaded itself and applied to the NAS. After a reboot I was now running firmware 4.1.0 and the full QnapTurboStation.

I slammed in my other 3 SATA HDDs into slots 2,3 and 4. Then I configured my storage as I wanted. All done and happy!

I’ve currently downloaded HD Station (XMBC and Chrome) and will experiment further.

I’ve carved out a storage chunk for my own data (tonnes of Technet ISOs, Movies, Music and CBTs/Tutorials) and a significant chunk as an iSCSI target for my 2 vSphere boxes.

Update

You can actually update the firmware to the latest version once your QFinder locates your NAS and advises via the prompt to update to the latest firmware (even though I said to cancel the prompt). The issue that remains is that the DISK firmware is then out of sync with the NAS firmware. Once you have succesfully applied the latest firmware once, you will actually need to apply it AGAIN once you have all your disks back into the drive bays. This updates the DISK firmware to match the NAS. You will continue to get warnings in the web interface about the firmware mismatch until you do this.

26 thoughts on “Magic a Fujitsu Celvin Q802 into a QNAP TS-469 Pro”

Good instructions! Worked perfectly when I followed the instructions to the letter. I made the mistake of updating the firmware following the QNAPQfinder prompt to upgrade (itchy trigger finger 😯 ). The upgrade took but I kept getting error logs about disk firmware not able to coexist with latest Qnap firmware (4.1.0).
Very important to update with TS-469_20130816-3.8.4.img before updating to 4.1.0!!! 😛

Hi Jorg, thanks for the comment. Mine took a while (10-15 minutes) after the QNAP screen but not a very long time as you describe.

From having read previous instructions from conversions of older NAS boxes it seems you might have try to apply the firmware update more than once before you are successful. Perhaps I was just lucky and it worked first time.

Basically keep trying the copy firmware off the USB within Puppy Linux and reboot the NAS until it works.

Ensure you are using the correct firmware file, and that your NAS box is the right model for that firmware. What is the model version of your Celvin?

I had this problem when I applied the wrong firmware, after ‘QNAP’ logo the screen is blank and the fan goes crazy but nothing else happens.
If it’s working the fan should not be making so much noise.

For now I would try the procedure again, sometimes the firmware file isn’t copied correctly to USB or from USB > NAS.
Switch of the NAS by holding the power button down for a few seconds. Remove the USB drive and try it all over again.

Do you know if i can keep my data on the disks, if i’m going to flash from Fujitsu branded Firmware 4.0.7 to the original QNAP 4.1.x, if i remove the disks all together, use a new, fifth one for the flashing process and plug them back in after i’m finished?

I would say NO, such a firmware change will NOT retain your data. Remember that you’re are not really ‘upgrading’ but actually changing the firmware completely, although much of the firmware is the same I do not know what additional modifications the Fujitsu firmware has especially when related to Storage.

The reason I say this is because part of the firmware change and subsequent Qfinder search re-initialises the whole system – just like it is being used for the first time, this includes initiliasing the Disks and building any RAID configuration. I think it unlikely that it will pick up your data structure, especially if any type of RAID has been setup before.

From previous experience I would say you need a good backup of your NAS data, and only then proceed with the firmware upgrade. Assume that you will lose ALL your data, so please BACK IT UP, if somehow after you upgrade it does still see your data then consider that a bonus AND also please let us know.

this should be interesting for everyone. I managed to do it without data loss. And not only that, even the whole configuration has been restored, including IP-settings, users, etc.

Here is how i’ve done it:

* Q802 with firmware 4.0.7. from Fujitsu
* removed all disks, booted with Puppy Linux, flashed the QNAP 1.2.8. (as described above)
* booted with 1.2.8 until “Ready for test” showed on the LCD Display
* put in a single, new disk and run Qfinder
* flashed the NAS with the original QNAP Firmware 4.0.7. (first build) via Qfinder
* shutdown the NAS after Qfinder showed that the process has been successful
* removed new disk, put the original four disks back in in the same order
* booted the NAS until it showed up again in Qfinder
–> now it already had the original name and IP-adress
* flashed the newest firmware available
–> booted up with original QNAP 4.1.1. , with all data and same configurations as before

hi, im having some problems with this, during the boot phase it beeps tells me there are no disks then goes to the fujitsu boot screen asking for a login?
i have tried 2 different 1GB usb drives but the same rewsult

If someone has a problem booting puppy linux and getting message “display out of range”,
just edit the isolinux.cfg on the usb-stick and change the last line from:
“append initrd=initrd.gz pmedia=usbflash”
to
“append initrd=initrd.gz pfix=nox pmedia=usbflash”

or press [F2] while bootlogo is shown an write:
puppy pfix=nox pmedia=usb
then press [Enter]

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Zulfs blog where you'll find bits of random info on tech, cars, trading and religion. All mashed up MongoDB style! Just to be very CLEAR all opinions are my own personal viewpoints and should not be taken as gospel without verification. Happy Kindling.

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About

Zulfs blog where you'll find bits of random info on tech, cars, trading and religion. All mashed up MongoDB style! Just to be very CLEAR all opinions are my own personal viewpoints and should not be taken as gospel without verification. Happy Kindling.